Re:David Graeber’s Possible Worlds
by disgruntledphd2 on Friday November 12, 2021 @06:22AM
(#29198176)
> modern economists have been acknowledging and quantifying the flaws in simplifying assumptions in economic models for decades
Just FYI, both Kahneman and Tversky were psychologists, not economists.
Re:David Graeber’s Possible Worlds
by bluecheese33 on Friday November 12, 2021 @10:43AM
(#29200391)
Noted, but they still are pretty accepted in mainstream economics (nobel prize in economics in 2002).
Also of course, they're not the only ones doing behavioral economics [1]:
> Imperfect information is core to modern econ; theories showing how imperfect information can cause markets to break down received a Nobel 20 years ago. Perfect rationality has been successfully challenged by behavioral economics for decades, and received Nobels in 2002, 2013, and 2017.
[1] https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/this-years-econ-critics-ma... (includes links)
Re:David Graeber’s Possible Worlds
by disgruntledphd2 on Friday November 12, 2021 @10:58AM
(#29200610)
Definitely, but it amused me that psychologists keep winning the economics nobel :)
It might say more about economics than it does about psychology :)
Economics is hard. Behavioral economics is having a hard time right now with many of the core hypothesis (loss aversion) and key interventions (priming) turning out to be experimentally not-reproducible.
See https://www.thebehavioralscientist.com/articles/the-death-of... - for an overview.
Behavioral economcis is just one branch. The idea that economists always believed humans were 100% rational decision makers has never ever been true.
That just a strawmen that Garber and co set up. Anybody that actually studies the history of economics knows this.
That being said, I do think there is a serious problem in the way economics is often taught, and things like debt (and more broadly, anthropology) is part of the cure [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics
[2] https://ravik.substack.com/p/does-learning-economics-make-yo...